The new proprietor was behind the counter, a balding man with a handkerchief knotted around his neck and wearing a blue and
white striped apron. He was wiping the counter’s shiny wooden top with a dishcloth. “Good morning, sir,” he said. “And what
can I get you?”
This is ridiculous, Moyo thought, we’re both dead, we’ve been rescued by some weird miracle, and all he’s interested in is
what I want to eat. We should be getting to know each other, trying to understand what’s happened, what this means to the
universe. Then he sensed the alarm burbling up in the proprietor’s thoughts, the man’s terribly brittle nature.
“I’ll have one of the doughnuts, of course, they look delicious. And have you got any hot chocolate?”
The proprietor gave a big smile of relief, sweat was prickling his forehead. “Yes, sir.” He busied himself with the jugs and
cups behind the counter.
“Do you think Ekelund will succeed?”
“I expect so, sir. She seems to know what she’s doing. I did hear she came from another star. That’s one resourceful lady.”
“Yes. Where do you come from?”
“Brugge, sir. Back in the twenty-first century. A fine city it was in those days.”
“I’m sure.”
The proprietor put a mug of steaming hot chocolate on the counter along with a doughnut. Now what? Moyo wondered. I haven’t
got a clue what kind of coin to conjure up.
The whole situation was becoming more surreal by the second.
“I’ll put it on your bill, sir,” the proprietor said.
“Thank you.” He picked up the mug and plate, glancing around. There were only three other people in the cafÉ. A young couple
were oblivious to anything but each other. “Mind if I sit here?” he asked the third, a woman in her late twenties, making
no attempt to cloak herself in any kind of image. Her head came up to show tear trails smearing chubby pale cheeks.
“I was just going,” she muttered.
“Don’t, please.” He sat opposite her. “We ought to talk. I haven’t talked to anyone for centuries.”
Her eyes looked down at her coffee cup. “I know.”
“My name’s Moyo.”
“Stephanie Ash.”
“Pleased to meet you, Stephanie. I don’t know what I should be saying, half of me is terrified by what’s happened, the other
half is elated.”
“I was murdered,” she whispered. “He… he. He laughed when he did it, every time I screamed it just made him laugh louder.
He enjoyed it.” The tears were flowing openly again.
“I’m sorry.”
“My children. I had three children, they were only little, the eldest was six. What kind of life would they have knowing what
happened to me? And Mark, my husband, I thought I saw him once, later, much later. He was all broken down and old.”
“Hey there, it’s over now, finished,” he said softly. “Me, I got hit by a bus. Which is a tricky thing to do in Kochi’s capital
city; there are barriers along the roads, and safety systems, all kinds of protective junk. But if you’re real stupid, and
loaded, and part of a group that’s daring you to run the road, then you can jump in front of one before its brakes engage.
Yeah, real tricky, but I managed it. So what use was my life? No girl, no kids; just Mum and Dad who would have been heartbroken.
You had something, a family that loved you, kids you can be proud of. You were taken away from them, and that’s a real evil,
I’m not saying it isn’t. But look at you now, you still love them after all this time. And I’ll bet wherever they are, they
love you. Compared to me, Stephanie, you’re rich. You had it all, the whole life trip.”
“Not anymore.”
“No. But then this is a fresh start for all of us, isn’t it? You can’t allow yourself to grieve over the past. There’s too
much of it now. If you do that, then you’ll never do anything else.”
“I know. But it’s going to take time, Moyo. Thank you, anyway. What were you, some kind of social worker?”
“No. I was at university studying law.”
“You were young, then?”
“Twenty-two.”
“I was thirty-two when it happened.”
Moyo bit into his doughnut, which tasted as good as it looked. He grinned and gave the proprietor an appreciative thumbs up.
“I can see I’ll be coming back here.”
“It seems silly to me,” she confided.
“Me too. But it’s the way he’s chosen to anchor himself.”
“Are you sure it was law, and not philosophy?”
He smiled around the doughnut. “That’s better. Don’t go for the big issues right away, you’ll only get depressed, start small
and work along to quantum metaphysics.”
“You’ve lost me already, when I did work I was just a councillor at the local junior day club. I adored children.”
“I don’t think you were
just
anything, Stephanie.”
She sat back in the chair, toying with the tiny coffee cup. “So what do we do now?”
“Generally speaking?”
“We have only just met.”
“Okay, generally speaking, try and live the life we always wanted to. From now on, every day is going to be a summer’s day
you’ve taken off work so that you can go out and do the one thing you’ve always wanted to.”
“Dance in the Rubix Hotel,” she said quickly. “It had the most beautiful ballroom, the podium was big enough for a whole orchestra,
and it looked out over the grounds to a lake. We never went to a function there; Mike always promised he’d take me. I wanted
to wear a scarlet gown, with him in a dinner jacket.”
“Not bad. You’re a romantic, Stephanie.”
She blushed. “What about you?”
“Oh, no. Mine are all pretty basic male daydreams. Tropical beaches and girls with perfect figures; that kind of thing.”
“No, I don’t believe that. There’s more to you than simplistic clichÉs. And besides, I told you mine.”
“Well… I suppose there is mountain gliding. It was a richkid sport on Kochi. The gliders were made out of linked molecule
films, only weighed about five kilos, but they had a wingspan of about twenty-five metres. Then before you could even get
in to one you had to have your retinas and cortical processor implants upgraded so that you could actually see air currents,
determine their flow speed; the whole X-ray vision trip. That way you’d be able to pick out the wind stream which could carry
you to the top.
“The clubs would set out courses over half a mountain range. I watched a race once. The pilots looked like they were lying
in a torpedo-shaped bubble; the linked molecule film is so thin you can’t even see it unless the sun catches it just right.
They were skiing on air, Stephanie, and they made it seem like the easiest thing in the world.”
“I don’t think either of us is going to be living our fantasies for a while.”
“No. But we will, eventually, when Ekelund takes over Mortonridge. Then we’ll have the power to indulge ourselves.”
“That woman. God, she frightened me. I had to hold a man hostage while she spoke to the soldier. He was pleading and crying.
I had to give him to someone else afterwards. I couldn’t hurt him.”
“I let mine go altogether.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It was a boy. I think he got to the marines in time to be evacuated. Hope so, anyway.”
“That was good of you.”
“Yeah. I had the luxury this time. But if the Saldana Princess sends her troops in here to find us and claw us back, I’ll
fight. I’ll do everything I can to stop them from evicting me from this body.”
“I hear mine,” Stephanie said. “She’s inside me, lonely and afraid. She cries a lot.”
“My host’s called Eben Pavitt, he rages the whole time. But underneath he’s scared.”
“They’re as bad as the souls in the beyond. Everyone is making demands on us.”
“Ignore them. You can do it. Compared to the beyond, this is paradise.”
“Not really. But it’s a good first step.”
He finished his chocolate, and smiled. “Do you want to come for a walk, see what our new town is like?”
“Yes. Thank you, Moyo, I think I would.”
The Confederation Navy Intelligence Service had originally been formed with the intent of infiltrating the black syndicates
that produced antimatter, and hunting down their production stations. Since those early days its activities had expanded along
with those of the Confederation Navy as a whole. By the time Admiral Lalwani assumed command, one of its principal functions
was to monitor, analyse, and assess the deplorable amount of new and ingenious weapons systems manufactured by governments
and astroengineering companies across the Confederation, with emphasis on the more clandestine marques. To that end, the designers
of the service’s secure weapons technology laboratory complex were given a brief to contain just about any conceivable emergency,
from biohazards to outbreaks of nanonic viruses, to small nuclear explosions.
There was only one entrance: a long corridor cut through the rock with two right-angle turns; it was wide and high enough
to accommodate an outsize service truck or even a small flyer. Three separate doors were spaced along it, each built from
a two-metre-thickness of carbotanium composite strengthened by molecular binding force generators. The first two slabs could
only be opened by the security staff outside, while the third was operated from inside the facility.
Since the arrival of Jacqueline Couteur, Trafalgar’s population had started calling it the demon trap.
Appropriate enough, Samual Aleksandrovich conceded as the final door swung upwards amid a hiss of pressure and loud mechanical
whinings. Dr Gilmore was waiting on the other side to greet him and his entourage.
“I’m delighted I can actually offer you some good news for a change,” Dr Gilmore said as he led the First Admiral up to the
biological division’s isolation facility. “We’ve all heard about New California. Is it really Al Capone leading them?”
“We don’t have any evidence to the contrary,” Lalwani said. “The Edenists in the system are monitoring news broadcasts. Capone
appears very fond of publicity, he’s been touring cities like some kind of medieval monarch. Pressing the flesh, he calls
it. A number of reporters were left unpossessed purely so they could record the event.”
“And this pre-starflight primitive had the ability to take over one of our most developed worlds?” Dr Gilmore inquired. “I
find that hard to credit.”
“Don’t,” Lalwani said. “We’ve been researching him. He’s a genuine emperor genotype. People like him have an intuitive ability
to format social structures which support their premiership, whatever their local environment, from street gangs to entire
nations. Thankfully they don’t occur very often, nor at such a high level; but when they do the rest of us need to watch out.”
“Even so—”
“Obviously, he’s getting advice on modern life. There will be an inner cabinet to help him, but he won’t share the ultimate
power. We don’t believe he’s psychologically capable of it. That could be a significant weakness given the sheer quantity
of problems he must be facing in enforcing his rule.”
“So far New California is the only planetary system we know of which has succumbed completely,” the First Admiral said. “Seventeen
more planets are suffering from largescale incursions, and are doing their best to isolate the affected areas. Fortunately
the legitimate authorities retained control of their SD networks. The worst casualties have been among the asteroid settlements;
our last estimation was that we’d lost over a hundred and twenty Confederation-wide. If a possessed gets inside one, their
success rate in taking it over is close to a hundred percent. It’s proving difficult to fight them in such closed environments.
Other planets have had trouble, but on a much smaller scale. Our warning seems to have had the required effect. It could have
been a lot worse.”
“Our main concern is that nobody attempts any foolhardy liberation missions,” Lalwani said. “There would be few national navies
capable of mounting a successful operation along those lines. At the moment any troops entering such an environment are liable
to be possessed themselves.”
“There will be political pressure on the military to act, though,” the First Admiral said dourly. “So far our only notable
public success has been the destruction of the
Yaku
in the Khabrat system. Trivial. What we need above all is some kind of weapon which is able to incapacitate the possessed.
That or an effective method of exorcism. Preferably both.” He gave Dr Gilmore a questing gaze.
“I believe we can now help you on the first count,” the implant specialist said confidently. They stopped before the biological
isolation facility, and he datavised his code at the door.
Euru’s researchers had acted swiftly as soon as they’d obtained permission to advance their studies. The First Admiral flinched
at the sight which greeted him within the examination room. On his side, the monitoring consoles were fully staffed; remorselessly
obsessive scientists and technicians absorbed in the displays projected by AV pillars. A scene of brisk competence and scientific
endeavour, as always reinforcing the concept of impersonal efficiency.
Samual Aleksandrovich doubted there was any other way the team could cope with their objective; it must act as a psychological
buffer between them and the subject.
Subject
—he chided himself silently. Although he’d witnessed inhumanity on a far more brutal scale than this during his active service
days.
With Captain Khanna at his side he walked hesitantly up to the transparent wall which cut the rock chamber in two, wondering
if he should show signs of dismay or approval. In the end he settled for the same bleak acceptance which everyone else in
the room had put on along with their baggy white lab overalls.
A naked and shaven Jacqueline Couteur had been immobilized on a surgical bed. Although wired into it would be a more honest
evaluation, the First Admiral thought. Grey composite ribs formed a cage over the length of her body, supporting clamps which
pressed pairs of large circular electrodes against her forearms, abdomen, and upper legs; clear jell was leaking out from
beneath the silvery metal, ensuring better contact and conductivity. Two ceiling-mounted waldo arms had been equipped with
sensor arrays, like bundles of fat white gun muzzles, which they were sweeping slowly and silently up and down the prone body.
The thick circular brace which held her head fast looked as if it had melded with her skin. A plastic defecation tube had
been inserted in her anus, while a free-fall toilet suction catheter adhered to her vagina. He couldn’t decide if that was
a civilized courtesy or the final humiliation.